This year, more than 800,000 people registered to vote in November’s upcoming midterm elections—a striking comparison to the 154,500 who registered for those in 2014. Folks are becoming civically engaged more than ever before and Community Partners is proud to support a growing number of projects working to encourage that impulse all year-round. With the elections just days away, it seemed like a good time to highlight four of those projects specifically focused on voter engagement and the barriers faced by different populations.

The Civics Center

Deeply disturbed by what she saw as an attack on democratic institutions during the 2016 elections, Laura Brill, an attorney and former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Ginsberg, knew she wanted to take action, she just wasn’t quite sure how. Then she came across a 2014 law that allows high school students to pre-register to vote. “I almost fell out of my chair,” she said, recognizing the value it held in encouraging more young people to register and vote. She also realized very few people actually knew about the law.

And so The Civics Center was born; its mission to help high schools comply with the little-known pre-registration law. They connect with high school teachers and administrators, providing them with resources to conduct their own voter pre-registration drives, along with non-partisan educational research to help increase interest in voting. They’ve also created an online voter pre-registration ‘button’ that links each high school’s website to a voter pre-registration resource. So far, according to Brill, The Civics Center has made thousands of connections at high schools in the west, as far north as Washington and Texas in the east. “While we don’t currently have the means to track how many voters we’ve helped get registered, I’ve heard back from each of these schools that they’ve registered hundreds of students and that is a huge victory,” she said.

California Native Voter Project

Also founded after the 2016 election, California Native Vote Project was created in response to what project leader Chrissie Castro saw as the lack of a cohesive native voter engagement entity in California, similar to those established in New Mexico and Montana. California itself contains the highest representation of native peoples in the country and the barriers they face to voting are legion. “There is a justified historical mistrust that our communities have with the government. We hear, ‘I don’t want to participate in a system that was never for us,’ and we understand that,” Castro explained. “We go into our communities and share a new perspective that if we don’t engage, then that leaves others to make decisions that impact our families and our communities.”

The California Native Vote Project helps native people understand where and how they need to register to vote, educates them on the issues on the ballot and how they will affect their communities. Other barriers that the group is working to address is the lack of a box to check identifying voters as Native American and voter suppression and intimidation in California’s rural northern counties. In those counties, registered native voters have faced verbal harassment at polling places and problems with non-traditional housing like trailer parks and motorhomes that don’t have required addresses. The California Native Vote Project now has a membership of 4,000 Native American community members engaged in their efforts and has registered 1,400 additional Native American voters so far. One of the more meaningful experiences for Castro has come when registering Native American elders in their 80s to vote. “When I asked them why they had never voted before they told me, ‘I didn’t know that this was something that our people did.’ We’ve received overwhelming feedback from the community that they love what we’re doing and they want more.”

Future of California Elections

The Future of California Elections, a project of Community Partners since 2012, brings together a cohesive network of election officials, civil rights organizations and election reform advocates to address the barriers that prevent robust voter engagement. Their first collective win was helping to establish a more equitable online registration process by advocating for the expansion of languages used beyond English and Spanish. Today online voter registration is available in ten languages, and serves as the model for online voter accessibility for the country.

One aspect of FOCE’s programming that project leader Astrid Ochoa is most proud of is their annual conference. “It is so important for election officials to meet face-to-face with advocates for communities of color and for folks with disabilities because not only do they learn what their communities are concerned about, but they learn how they can reach their communities, which is a huge factor in making elections more accessible.” FOCE is continuously looking ahead to methods in the future to keep fostering learning and understanding among their members to improve equity within California’s elections.

IssueVoter

IssueVoter, a relatively new project to Community Partners, is an online platform that works to keep citizens engaged in the democratic process all year round. When founder Maria Yuan was a campaign manager in Iowa, she realized that community engagement was limited to an election season and that when the elections were over, individuals’ interest in the actions of their electeds would die down. “It really frustrated me because you would never hire and promote an employee without reviewing their work, and essentially that is what we are doing with our elected officials…it’s the work that’s done throughout the year that really effects our lives.”

It was that frustration that inspired Yuan to create IssueVoter which not only evaluates an elected on how they serve users’ particular interests, but also informs them of which new bills address an issue they care about and tracks the progress. Over 10,000 bills are introduced each year, yet only about a handful receive media coverage. With legislators passing new laws every week, it is Yuan’s hope that with more informed voters there will be more engagement year-round. Users receive alerts when new bills are about to be voted on that correspond with their concerns and interests, and within that alert is space to write to your representative’s office on that bill’s behalf. Representatives are engaging as well; in some instances, representatives’ offices have reached out to IssueVoter in order to be connected with a constituent directly and asked them to facilitate an introduction. Looking ahead to 2019, IssueVoter plans to introduce video content and text alerts.

It’s 13 days before the San Gabriel Valley plays host to what may be the most ambitious open streets event in the country and Wes Reutimann is understandably feeling slammed. “It’s definitely been the most difficult project of my professional career,” says the director of BikeSGV, the lead organizer of the upcoming event.

Two years in the planning, the 626 Golden Streets event, set for June 26, will open up 17 miles of San Gabriel Valley streets to people traffic — bicyclists, pedestrians and skaters – making it potentially the longest open streets route yet. The event required the coordination of seven San Gabriel Valley cities and one jurisdiction. Safety meetings have included officers from 16 different police and fire agencies. Three nonprofit organizations have been directly involved with planning and coordination, and several others are in charge of arts programming and other events to liven the day. “It’s been incredibly complex to coordinate,” Reutimann observed.

It’s an impressive feat for an organization that formed just six years ago, starting out as a loose, all-volunteer network of residents and community activists who wanted to better advance active transportation in the San Gabriel Valley. Now in its third year under fiscal sponsorship with Community Partners, BikeSGV is hitting its stride. Strategic planning and successful fund development have made additional staff possible. Beyond the work involved in planning the Golden Streets event, the group continues to host its monthly Bike Train community rides and is ramping up operations at its El Monte Bicycle Education Center. There, anyone can come in and learn to fix or build their own bike. There’s even a ‘build a bike/earn a bike program’ a more affordable route to bike ownership. In the long-term, they are helping to lead the way toward a bicycle ‘superhighway’ connecting metro stations and communities to a regional network of protected pathways certain to transform the area.

To what does Reutimann credit the organization’s success? “If you want to effect real change, you can’t do it alone,” he said, pointing to the organization’s well-connected advisory board, strong committed staff, and emphasis on cultivating relationships with residents, government representatives and others. “We couldn’t do this without our champions.”

The hope for the Golden Streets event is that it will serve as inspiration to visitors, residents, civic leaders and others. Reutimann and his team and their partners hope to introduce people to the Gold Line, to the possibility of cycling to their local stations, and to encourage more open streets events. They also want people to have a good time. “There is so much joy when folks are out at these events, walking and biking on streets with no cars – you can’t put a price on that. After two years of work, I know it will all be worth it.”

The barriers to achieving a college degree in California are legion.  Campuses at all levels – UC, state schools and community colleges – are at capacity, meaning less class availability, which results in more years in school — and more money spent on tuition. Add to that a vast disparity in who is prepared to go to college and an overall system lacking in oversight, and the potential consequences for California are dire: estimates are that by 2025, the state’s workforce will be short more than two million degrees.

Which is where California Competes comes in. Started in 2010 and a Community Partners project since 2017, California Competes: Higher Education for a Strong Economy is taking on the big issues facing higher education in California at a systems level. A two million-degree shortage is no small gap, and project leader Lande Ajose, who Governor Jerry Brown appointed to the California Student Aid Commission in 2014, wants to ensure that it will be closed equitably.

“Opportunity should not be based on your zip code; opportunity should be based on our belief that every Californian is able to succeed and that we should provide that opportunity for every resident,” she said. “Not only will this serve the individual well-being of students, but the research shows it has terrific benefits for the state in terms of the communities we live in, the businesses we run and the industries that we drive. It’s a win-win for everybody.”

With a team of education policy researchers and data analysts, California Competes is working to effect policy change by identifying existing obstacles to higher education, developing potential solutions, and educating state legislators and others with a hand in decision-making. California Competes focuses on the pragmatic ways the state’s economy will benefit from an improved system that helps students earn their degree and prepare for work in one of California’s varied and robust industrial sectors.

California Competes hosts policy institutes every year for legislators and policymakers who hear from guest speakers about key issues. This allows them to think together and to encourage dialogue around education policy issues and different ways they can be addressed.

In preparation for the upcoming election, Ajose met with the campaigns of gubernatorial and lieutenant governor candidates, including Democrat Gavin Newson and Republican John Cox, to emphasize to them the importance of higher education as a policy issue people and students care about and consider a top priority.

“The response from the candidates has been receptive and our candidates recognize that we need to do more to improve our higher education system,” Ajose said.

Although it was California that in the ‘60s created a now widely-used model for a statewide coordinating body to oversee higher education, it is currently one of only two states in the nation that does not have this kind of oversight in place. This puts the decision-making role in the hands of state lawmakers who are already focused on a vast array of issues impacting the state. But California Competes is working to keep the issues affecting students front and center as best they can. Next month’s policy institute will focus on the ways in which socio-economic status, financial means, race and gender all present obstacles to college completion.

The project’s February release of Opportunity Imbalance: Race, Gender, and California’s Education-to-Employment Pipeline emphasized the stark inequities Californians experience along the path from high school to college and into the workforce. To complement this research, California Competes partnered with Univision in a statewide public opinion poll that surveyed Latino voters’ perceptions of higher education. Their findings were presented during briefings in both Los Angeles and Sacramento in March.

Next year, the project will debut their Opportunity Index, an online data system that will track a set of variables that impact higher education each year in order to document disparities by region. The accessibility of this data will help hold the state accountable for equitable outcomes and is important in order to help groups on the ground advocate for more educational opportunities at the regional or county level.

Though it has been operating since 2010, California Competes joined Community Partners in 2017 and was excited to be fiscally sponsored by an organization that welcomes policy and advocacy work. “We receive expert counsel in so many areas from the Community Partners team, and the openness to our policy and advocacy work has been amazing,” Ajose noted. “Community Partners is not afraid of risk.”

With May comes Spring flowers, the anticipation of summer fun and high school seniors’ highly anticipated college admission letters. But not all high school seniors’ educational experiences are created equal, which is why Community Partners is proud to support our projects working to improve access to college for all students.

Even the highest-achieving students need help preparing for and managing their way through the often bewildering process of SAT and AP testing, applications, essay-writing and financial aid – particularly those public school students from lower income, immigrant families. This has been the focus of College Match, which maintains a 100 percent success rate in seeing their participants accepted into four-year institutions, three-quarters of which are top 25-ranked.

“These are excellent students, the brightest!” enthuses Harley Frankel, who founded the project in 2002. “They just don’t have the kind of support and understanding of the process that their wealthier, more connected peers have. College Match helps to bridge that gap.” In just the last four years, College Match helped 153 students get accepted to UC Berkeley, 141 into Middlebury, and 68 went to either Harvard, Stanford or Brown. The other 685 admissions are just as impressive.

While high-achieving students certainly deserve to be celebrated, Arif Haji has made it his mission to develop the talents of the “forgotten majority in college access, the kids who have a 2.5 to 3.5 GPA.” In its third year, College Access, Readiness and Success (CARS) has been a welcome addition at Leuzinger High School, a Title I school in the South Bay where most students are first in their family to attend or complete high school. CARS is a five-year program that supports students from their freshman year of high school through their freshman year of college. CARS’ program not only strives to assist students academically with after-school tutoring twice a week and a summer STEM program, but to also help them develop a better understanding of what it takes to get into a four-year institution. “I was a 3.5 GPA student at Leuzinger High School and it’s not because I didn’t want to go to college, it’s because I didn’t know what was required to attend college. CARS aims to teach these parents and these kids what it takes to attend a four-year institution because they don’t know what they don’t know,” said Haji.

In the city of Montebello first-generation students do not have the advantage of having a parent who can guide them through the college admission process nor advise them on what they need to do to get there. A full 89 percent of  area students are at the federal poverty level and 75 percent of their parents did not attend college. It was these factors that led Dan Clement to create College Bound Today and connect students with mentors that are passionate about higher education. In their sophomore-year, students are placed in groups of 10, each of which is guided by three mentors. “We are a completely volunteer-run organization,” says Clement, “We currently have 350 volunteers who spend one Saturday a month at a Montebello high school and of those, 120 are alumni students who are now mentoring kids at their former high school.” In addition to connecting students to role models who will guide them through the process, College Bound Today exposes students to college life and provides five college tours to UC and CSU campuses and a free 30-hour SAT prep course. A full 99 percent of College Bound Today students are accepted into college thanks to a community that is equipped to support them.

One of the biggest hurdles first-generation students face is navigating their way through college culture amongst their advantaged peers, which is why programs that support this huge transition are vital to student success.  Helping to connect and amplify the work of these and at least 70 other college access programs across the region is the Southern California College Access Network (SoCalCAN). In addition to the important work of keeping their member groups connected, informed, and engaged in advocacy for the benefit of the many low-income, disadvantaged and undocumented students their member groups serve, SoCalCAN also created a program that addresses students needs after they’ve been accepted onto college campuses. A network of college students offering peer-to-peer support as they journey through their college careers, Level Up students come from similar backgrounds and the majority are navigating the unknown and “the goal is that they persist,” notes program manager Rudy Torres. A first-generation college student himself, Torres was a beneficiary of College Match. “I would not have made it through the school that I went to back on the East Coast had it not been for my mentors. I felt the inequity in class, I felt it outside of class—even on the first day of orientation I noticed I was one of the only students of color in that space. It was very hard and seeing that inequality in college access is what inspired me to get involved in this work.”

In 2011 counties throughout California began taking on the responsibility of incarcerating and supervising non-violent felons. This was state-mandated realignment and as time went on, many counties began exploring new ways of addressing reentry, diversion and the supportive services that could potentially prevent crime or the revolving door to the criminal justice system.

Los Angeles County, however, took a more established approach, directing a full 80 percent of its $1.1 billion from the state toward incarceration and supervision in the first four years of realignment. An LA Times editorial lamented that the state’s largest county has yet to become the “leader in smart and effective justice” it ought to be.

But that’s exactly what a growing coalition of cross-sector service providers is pushing for. Under the smart and strategic guidance of project leader Peggy Edwards, the Los Angeles Regional Reentry Partnership has become a major player in the reentry policy arena since it formed in 2012. Member organizations number about 350 now and work in the areas of physical and mental health, homelessness, family reunification, housing, legal services, and substance abuse prevention and treatment.

“Now is the time to shape the process of reentry in California and Los Angeles,” Edwards says emphatically. With state funding in place, a shift in public attitudes toward criminal justice, a greater understanding about brain development and its impact on juveniles, Edwards sees a shift happening around reentry and incarceration, one that her group is working to capitalize on.

Together the network has been instrumental in influencing the County of Los Angeles to implement split sentencing (serving part of the sentence on probation rather than in prison) and to consider other alternatives to incarceration. They successfully advocated for eliminating the ban on people on probation and parole from the county’s rental assistance program, ending the plan to incarcerate 500 LA County prisoners in Kern County’s City of Taft, securing case management services for those impacted by re-alignment, and developing and implementing a plan to secure housing, drug treatment, and employment services for lifers released under Prop 36. Resource fairs they help sponsor are helping former incarcerated people navigate Prop 47 (which redefined some nonviolent offenses, most related to drug possession, as misdemeanors) and access resources to help them stabilize their lives post-incarceration.

“Coming together as a network allows leaders in these agencies to accomplish their goals through collective action,” says Edwards. It’s work that she knows intimately, somehow balancing leadership duties for both LARRP and the United Homeless Healthcare Partners, which is another regional network of service and advocacy organizations. Edwards started that group in 2006, eventually coming under fiscal sponsorship with Community Partners for a time. Which is why, when helping to form LARRP, she turned to Community Partners from the start.

“We needed a neutral home,” she explained, an important element whenever independent organizations come together as a network or coalition. “And we needed gravitas, a name so that partners and funders would see that we were legit.”

Most recently LARRP launched the 50% Campaign, an advocacy effort to ensure that half of the County’s realignment funds go to programs, housing, & services. And they increasingly serve as the go-to experts for key leaders at the County level on how homeless services, and other related programs, need to work hand-in-hand to achieve successful realignment.

“We can no longer afford to frame reentry and incarceration through a law enforcement lens alone,” Edwards says recently, noting that the County’s approach had been “a dysfunctional system that has short-changed services that could save money and reduce recidivism, homelessness and other costly co-existing problems.”

When a group of national and statewide environmental organizations, community based groups and leaders came together as San Gabriel Mountains Forever in 2008, the new coalition had just one mission in mind: to secure the safety and preservation of the historic San Gabriel Mountains. Just six years later, with the help of both Congresswoman Judy Chu and LA County Supervisor Hilda Solis, and with an unyielding focus on the needs and desires of local community members, the coalition saw their goal come to fruition: President Obama designated the San Gabriel Mountains in 2014 as the country’s latest national monument.

It was a huge win, but the coalition didn’t stop there. They’ve since expanded their mission to focus beyond the San Gabriel Mountains and changed their name, in many ways as a response to what they heard from community members, explained executive director Belinda Faustinos. “They’d say ‘yeah, it’s great to visit the San Gabriel Mountains but I can only do that once a month. It’d be great if I could get a park experience in my neighborhood that I can take my kids to.’ We’ve really embraced that.”

As Nature for All, the coaliton upholds its three pillars of environmental health and wellness: water, transit and parks under the leadership of veteran environmental advocate Faustinos. She previously served as the executive officer of the San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy (RMC) and the executive officer of three joint entities: the Watershed Conservation Authority, the San Gabriel River Discovery Center Authority and the Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority. Faustinos had her work cut out for her managing relationships with 38 different cities with their own agencies within Los Angeles County.

“It was scary at first, but in the end, that’s what I ended up loving most about it. It was a collaborative process and you really had to get people to buy into what you were trying to achieve in their communities. Coming from a bureaucratic background has been an advantage in policy and advocacy work.”

It’s that community buy in that is so difficult and yet so essential to effecting policy change. Hewing to that strategy, Nature for All has helped to influence several successful pieces of legislation and currently are working on the implementation of the recently passed Measure A, which secured continued funding for open space and natural local water resources, and Measure M, a sales tax to fund a traffic improvement plan. Faustinos stresses that high-need communities are essential to their work and she not only wants to listen, but to empower them to advocate for themselves.

“We want Measure A to meet the needs of park poor communities and we want those constituents to understand what the process is to make their voices heard, how they can get their ideas approved, and how they can make their issues known,” Faustinos explained. “We’re hoping to create a toolkit that will help facilitate that.”  As they work on Measure M Nature for All and its members are working with Metro to create an equitable access Transit to Trails plan, a shuttle service that would make stops at Metro stations and nearby wild parks. The pilot is currently operating in Pasadena with shuttle service from the Merill Park Station to Altadena’s Sam Merill Trailhead. “We’re looking at transportation through a different lens because what’s important to one family is not as important to another.”

While the pilot is promising, Faustinos advised that “any major policy shift can take five to 10 years, so you really have to keep the momentum up and the community engaged to support what you’re doing.” In addition to their volunteer outreach, Nature for All launched their Leadership Academy in 2011 to educate, develop and encourage environmental stewards to care for public lands and to advocate for the protection and enhancement of mountains, forests, rivers, parks, and urban open spaces. A total of 27 Leadership Academy graduates have gone on to work in the environmental space and many continue volunteering with Nature for All. “We’ve been really lucky that we’ve had some phenomenal students that recently created a stewards group because after they go through the academy they want to stay on to help with our efforts,” she said. “It’s great that we’ve got them so engaged!”

Nature for All puts community at the forefront of any policy advocacy work that they do. Including Leadership Academy graduates, volunteers and community members, Nature for All has brought 702 community members to public meetings. Community members that are constituents of an elected official are always invited to accompany Nature for All during meetings with that official to voice their own issues or concerns for their environment.

Faustino recalled a recent trip to Washington D.C.: “One woman, Lydia, went with us and she said ‘I’m so nervous, I just really appreciate being given the opportunity to come.’ And I said, ‘No, we are grateful to you because you represent what we’re trying to achieve and the fact that you’re here is indicative that we’re doing things right.’ She is a symbol of our success.”

You can learn more about and meet the members of Nature for All at the Heart of the Foothills CicLAvia event Sunday, April 22.

Nature for All includes: Amigos de los Rios, API Forward Movement (APIFM), Bike San Gabriel Valley (BikeSGV), California Wilderness Coalition (CalWild), The City Project, Climate Resolve, Council of Mexican Federations (COFEM), Day One, National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), Sierra Club, Trout Unlimited, and The Wilderness Society

A Powerful Alliance for Election Reform

Voter engagement may be at an all-time low — but not so the energy and enthusiasm among those working to bring more citizens to the polls.

Witness Future of California Elections, an unprecedented collaboration between election officials, civil rights organizations and reform advocates. With an enthusiastic new leader at the helm and some policy success under its belt, members have a strengthened commitment to forge ahead together.

“FOCE has helped to foster trust and deepen the existing collaboration between groups that had not yet worked together in a coordinated and substantive way,” said Vince Hall, FOCE’s new project leader, who brings two decades of public policy experience to his role. “Together we can present sensible recommendations much more clearly and powerfully.”

Brought together as an informal network of 18 organizations by the James Irvine Foundation in 2011, FOCE hired staff and became a fiscally sponsored project of Community Partners in 2013. Within its first year, FOCE members worked together to accelerate the development of policy for expanded online voting registration. They’ve since helped see through legislation that allows legal permanent residents to serve as poll workers, a key way to collapse language barriers. They’ve also helped with outreach to those potential poll workers, another of their many accomplishments.

“When you have major players like the ACLU of California, California Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, NALEO Educational Fund, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice-LA all agreeing with each other and working together alongside election officials, you know you’re onto something good,” said FOCE Deputy Director Astrid Garcia Ochoa.

FOCE held its third annual conference in Sacramento recently, a diverse gathering of some 300 election reform stakeholders, its largest yet. The event drew California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye for the keynote, and also featured such speakers as Secretary of State Alex Padilla, Assemblyman Sebastian Ridley-Thomas and Senator Ben Allen. It has also become an occasion for the release of valuable research to help inform policy.

Both Hall and Garcia Ochoa see a lot of energy around election reform, particularly with the new secretary of state. They are excited to support FOCE members as they push more aggressively for reform in the coming year and work together to address key issues.

They also credit Community Partners with helping to keep them focused on their work. “You make us so much bigger,” says Garcia Ochoa. “With Community Partners crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s, we are able to focus on our work on impacting California’s democracy.”

Language barriers, accessibility issues for the disabled, budgetary constraints, and a system that’s fallen drastically behind technologically are all seen as the systemic problems keeping voter turnout at historic lows, says Hall. Then there is voter apathy.

“People have been misled to believe their vote doesn’t count,” he lamented. “We need to engage people at an early age in education and dialogue about the opportunities and responsibilities that come with living in a democracy.”

Changeist (formerly Big Citizen Hub), a Community Partners project since 2014, has recently been recognized on both the state and global levels. The project, which works to expand the social capital of young people and mobilizes youth to explore the issues they care about most, has been tapped by the office of Governor Gavin Newsom to be part of the Governor’s 9-point plan to increase civic engagement of Californians, and project leader Mario Fedelin has been named an Obama Foundation Fellow, which supports civic innovators around the world. Changeist’s co-founders Beth Bayouth and Mario Fedelin say evaluation has been a huge factor in setting them apart, so we thought it would be interesting, instructive, and hopefully inspiring to fellow project staff to learn more about how Mario and Changeist’s Chief Impact Officer, Manijeh Mahmoodazeh, are using data collection and evaluation to change the organization.

Embrace learning, not fear.

When Mario and Beth began developing the organization in 2013-2014, a primary goal they set was to stand the test of time. They saw many youth development organizations created in the 1980s and ‘90s (and earlier) struggling to exist and remain relevant because they were resistant to signals around them indicating a need to change for current times. Mario wanted to figure out “how to not be fearful of evaluation but instead use it to change us.” He would face that challenge head-on just five years in. As Big Citizen Hub, the group originally intended to redefine the word “citizen” based on what it means to be invested in one’s community. But because the word “citizen” has become politicized, and even weaponized in the U.S., it spawned a lot of tension among youth participants and their parents. Feedback loops and data points were letting the organization know that the change in definition they were seeking just wasn’t happening in the current politicized climate. Instead of fearing what the data were telling them, the project leaders listened and chose to make a responsive pivot: they rebranded as Changeist. Mario describes this as one of the small ways they’re using information, but it’s really big, as is the shift in thinking it takes for some people to stop being afraid of interacting with data. This is one way Mario and Beth have created an organization unlike any they had ever worked in before. To keep the focus on learning, rather than using evaluation to judge and punish those who “fail,” Manijeh explores process questions with the team. They look at not just if the program works, but how it works, why it works, for whom it works, under what circumstances it works. Talking about the process moves away from the binary of success or failure, while still highlighting positive program aspects to amplify, as well as areas for growth.

Don’t separate evaluation and program development.

For many people the word “evaluation” brings to mind surveys that are administered at the end of a program to help determine if the program achieved its goals. This kind of delayed and linear evaluation has long been a source of frustration for many social innovators who want more rapid learning loops to help them adapt in real time. Instead of waiting until the end of a program to engage with an evaluator, leaders of initiatives addressing complex social issues find an embedded approach more useful. Engaging with an evaluator is an expense many CP project leaders think they can’t afford, but Mario sees it as an investment in the ongoing health of the program. Program development and process evaluation are so tightly woven that, for them, it’s all just programming. They use mobile surveys to collect data each week in real time, and their weekly analysis of those data informs how they engage with their youth participants and structure their program for the next week. It was this approach that also caught the attention of leaders in Sacramento. Governor Gavin Newsom’s office was so impressed by how Changeist collects and uses data, they invited the project to expand into an AmeriCorps program in multiple California cities. In 2019 Changeist is bringing its program to Stockton and growing the number of young people its LA program serves. In 2020 they’ll expand into another Central Valley city. Case-making is not Mario’s primary interest in data and evaluation, but he does admit that having Manijeh at the meetings with Governor Newsom’s team made it really easy to talk about why the program works: “The amount of research that we put into our program to make sure we’re doing the right stuff and that we’re looking at the right stuff and we’re responding to the right stuff, that is what made the case kind of bullet proof.” Their primary interest in gleaning information, however, is so that evaluation is another part of their program that empowers youth to share their voice, to feel more comfortable to show up as their whole selves, and to exercise their right to self-determination.

Know what’s important to you.

Knowing what’s important to you is the first step in finding the right evaluator (or any collaborator). Mario is a creative and critical thinker who knew he wanted to work with an evaluator who would be up for trying things that are cutting edge or methods that others might view as “backward.” Manijeh’s values, priorities, and work style were the right fit for the organization. Her out-of-the-box thinking led her to adapt a method that was used in academic research but never in programming to create Changeist’s mobile surveys. Knowing what’s important to your organization lets you operationalize your organizational values. Evaluators often help organizations not only define and articulate their values or guiding principles, they also uncover where the organization’s activities are supporting (or not) the goals of enacting those values. Changeist’s organizational values inform all of their decision-making processes, including their development strategies. So, as Mario points out, there is a direct connection between evaluation and how and from whom they seek support. Perhaps most importantly, Changeist works hard to keep themselves youth-centered. Their evaluation processes aim to create an environment where their young people feel empowered to share their voices. Evaluation helps cultivate a culture in which the program designers and implementers are holding themselves accountable to the program participants. Evaluation keeps the organization responsive, relevant, and youth-centered.

Advice to project leaders thinking about engaging with evaluators

Mario: The first step is wanting it. Having the idea of wanting to use information. A barrier for peers in the youth development space is that they don’t find worth in information. Take a first step, and start with what may feel most comfortable. Once you feel comfortable with the idea of using information, then you can start to stretch, and the evaluator might be able to convince you to do the right thing or the different thing or the scary thing.

Manijeh:

• Don’t be afraid to ask the obvious question. Sometimes you can overthink things too much in the evaluation process and forget that asking a young person if they’re having fun right now while they’re at your event or experience is valuable data in and of itself.
• In working with your evaluator the first step should be taking a real and honest look in the mirror and trying to figure out for yourself: Do we have systems in place that can change? Am I, as one of the people with power in this organization, someone who is OK with hearing about my shortcomings and my program/baby’s shortcomings? That’s what’s going to make evaluation meaningful — being able to accept the places where growth needs to happen and then having the drive to do the best possible. Make sure that folks feel comfortable in your space to be honest, to give you feedback and data, and to use it.
• People tend to think that data is just numbers that come from surveys, but data is everywhere in your organization. It’s also what your staff tells you, it’s also what the people experiencing your program tell you. So start thinking about data more openly, in that it’s not just the formal sources, but it’s also your employees’ perspectives. That is data in and of itself, but it often doesn’t have formal avenues to get to you.

Extra bonus for project leaders who dread having to create a logic model only because funders are asking for one: Check out how the Changeist logic model contributes to telling the story of their programs and the changes they’re aiming to create.

Chikako Yamauchi, a program evaluator and Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at Community Partners, has over 15 years of nonprofit experience in the arts, research and evaluation.

Photo credit: Beth Bayouth

Oscar Menjivar uses himself as an example of how a young man can be inspired to reach for a better life. If a caring mentor and an introduction to computers worked for him, why not offer that to other boys growing up poor in South Los Angeles?

That is the concept behind Teens Exploring Technology (TXT), the mentorship and leadership program founded by the Watts native that teaches young boys and men of color to code. Begun in 2008, Menjivar’s project, which has been fiscally sponsored by Community Partners since 2010, has proven to be a winning approach: all participating students graduate from high school, and 95 percent go on to attend a four-year college, according to the organization.

And Menjivar himself has just recently been honored as one of six recipients of the James Irvine Foundation’s Leadership Awards, which each year recognizes and supports individuals who are advancing innovative and effective solutions to significant state issues.

In the case of TXT and Menjivar, that issue is the opportunity gap facing students in Watts and South LA, where “less than one percent of schools in South Los Angeles offer computer science classes, and 80 percent of families in the area do not own a home computer,” according to this Irvine profile.

TXT offers after-school programs, a summer coding academy and now even has its own ‘hackerspace’ called the Cube where students come to develop skills in computer programming, user design, web development, robotics, and entrepreneurship.

After one of the project’s Demo Day events, teens presented an array of innovative apps and solutions relevant to their lives. There was a cell phone app to help lower-income families find free events they could attend together, a program that would reserve and pay for washing machines and dryers in advance so people could avoid spending hours waiting at laundromats, and another app to alert young transit riders to wake up if they fall asleep on long bus rides so they don’t miss their stops.

As Menjivar said to Irvine: “We’re creating a family, a culture of excellence, and brotherhood where young men of color gain the skills and networks to give back to their communities and help other young people like them, ultimately creating a circle of reciprocity.”